SEO S EARCH E NGINE O PTIMISATION

E VER WONDERED HOW GOOGLE MATCHES YOUR SEARCHES TO WEBSITES ? Key words there are keywords hidden here! Social media Links Sponsored links Updating content regularly These are some of the ways that Google ranks a website and decides how far down the list it will appear on searches. Use of these tools allow companies to optimise their websites for search engines to gain a high place on the list.

W HAT IS SEO? SEO or ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ is set of tools used to make a website appear as close to the top of the list as possible. Search for ‘mobile phones’ online now and see what is on the first page of Google. Most of them are companies you have heard of, this is because the big companies have lots of money to spend on SEO and rank high on search results.

K EYWORDS Sample Company Scenario: Exotic Gift Baskets, Inc. sells gift baskets which contain exotic coffees, candies, nuts and flowers. Their claim to fame is a line of gift baskets known as "Quick Baskets," which they can usually ship within 6 hours. The corporate office is based in New York and ships to anywhere in the U.S. and Canada. The majority of their business is done during the holiday season. Using clear, accurate keywords for your web site is very important.

K EYWORDS From the business scenario on the previous slide decide what you think 3 good keywords would be for that companies website and write them in below. Use these links to learn more about keywords to help you, then replace the bullet points with your answers!

L INKS When another website puts a link to your website on theirs, you create another strand of the web. Having lots of links to your site elsewhere on the internet will increase your ranking and make your website appear higher on the list. I have hidden keywords in more places, keep looking!

Key words hidden here! S PONSORED LINKS In the example below, (Google search engine results page (SERP), you can see two sponsored links sections, one above the "natural" or organic links and one to the right of the organic results.

S PONSORED LINKS Sponsored links from AdWords are links to websites that pay for placement next to Google search results. These advertisements are always clearly labelled as 'Sponsored Links', and are targeted to the topic and location of a search. For example, search results for 'hotels near LAX' will show sponsored links from certain hotels in this area. Sponsored links are simply another way to find websites that contain the information that you're searching for.AdWords Learn how you can advertise with sponsored links from AdWords.advertise with sponsored links from AdWords Excerpt from google.com

S OCIAL MEDIA You must know about Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites. But did you know that you could use them to get better SEO for your website? Having a good following on Twitter can get people talking about your business, they may tweet to their followers about your site and that could generate new links to your website.

U PDATING CONTENT REGULARLY Updating your website on a regular basis will also help to improve your search rankings. This is because of a program called a webcrawler. A webcrawler will start in any given website, and then follow every single link it finds there to different sites. It will keep doing this over and over until it has searched every single connected strand of the web that it can access. Whenever a webcrawler comes across a site that has changed since it was last viewed, it registers that and search engines will rank it higher. This is because the information on the site has been recently updated, and therefore is more likely to be relevant to the person searching.

G OOD PRACTICE IN SEO Some good practices are: Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users. Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you, or to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

B AD PRACTICE IN SEO SEO can be used deceptively and if a website is found to be in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines it can be taken down, there also could be legal consequences. These are some bad practices that are mainly concerned with hiding keywords: Using white text on a white background like this keyword! Locating text behind an image Setting the font size to 0

D ID YOU KNOW ? There are some bad practices in this slide show, see if you can find them all! this - keyword!